There are many reasons to marvel at the rise of blogging. In just a few years, millions of people have taken to blogs to express themselves, while tens if not hundreds of millions of Internet users have turned to them as a way to get news, information and conversation.

Here’s what really astounds me: No one invented blogging.

I was struck by this fact while reading “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, And Why It Matters,” by Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon.com. Over the course of the book Rosenberg attempts to wrap his arms around this unwieldy topic and trace its origins and impact.

In the first half of the book, Rosenberg reviews the small contributions made here and there that eventually set the stage for the blogging revolution. Rosenberg writes: “The efforts to identify a ‘first blog’ are comical, and ultimately, futile, because blogging was not invented; it evolved.”

So many of the most truly revolutionary innovations tend to be like that. Just think about the Internet itself. While there recently have been numerous celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the first message being sent on ARPANET, a precursor to today’s Web, really, the Internet we know today was the result of numerous contributions over the years, both big and small.

And even when it was about to burst into the mainstream, and quickly became part of the fabric of our everyday lives and businesses, nobody really seemed to see it coming. Back in the early 1990s, big telecommunications and tech firms were investing billions of dollars in interactive TV they claimed we all wanted (and something I’m still not sure I do).

But we didn’t; instead, we jumped onto America Online and then the Internet.

More recently, this happened with Wi-Fi. In the late 1990s, the big telecom companies were focused on wireless broadband, superfast Internet access delivered over cellular networks, expected to take years to develop.

But instead grass-roots users embraced Wi-Fi, even though it was slower, had a smaller footprint, and had to overcome the challenge of harnessing together a number of technical pieces. I remember first using Wi-Fi when a student living across the street in a group house asked if he could put a Wi-Fi router on my DSL connection so they could piggyback off our high-speed connection. That was five years ago, and such hot spots have multiplied since then.

Something similar happened with blogging. Companies were pushing the idea that we all wanted to build our own Web sites, through free services like GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod. People did use them for a while, adorning them with all sorts of goofy animations, photos and journal-like entries. But Yahoo, which bought GeoCities, just recently closed it down while Tripod and Angelfire, both bought by Lycos, linger on.

Blogging surpassed all of these in scale and impact. But to get there, it took a winding road.

There was the Web, of course, which many of us discovered in the early 1990s. There was Justin Hall, the pioneer of lifestreaming and someone I hadn’t thought about in years, posting links and updates about his life through hand-coded html pages.

There was Berkeley-based developer Dave Winer in the late 1990s creating software to allow anyone to build their own Web page, hoping to trigger a publishing revolution. And later, Winer championed RSS, or really simple syndication, that helped make it easier to follow and share content from blogs.

And then there was Jorn Barger, who coined the term “weblogs” in December 1997 when he called his new Web site built on Winer’s software the “Robot Wisdom WebLog.”

And there was Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, who started a company called Pyra to create collaboration software, but along the way created a side project called Blogger that automated and simplified the process of updating a weblog.

This is not the way we prefer to think about innovations. We like our founders’ myths, the image of the lone genius, sitting in a garage when suddenly the light bulb goes on.

Instead, blogging — and Wi-Fi and the Internet itself — was the result of a messy, uncertain path, charted by no one and navigated by many, solving a problem that no one knew existed.

Its success didn’t come from a giant corporate backer pouring loads of marketing dollars into it. It was the underdog, and that makes it the kind of innovation easy to root for.